TICKY FULLERTON, PRESENTER: Big losses today, but now for a big positive number. Origin Energy posted full-year net profit of $980 million, up 427 per cent on last year, partly thanks to the sell-down of a chunk of its stake in the huge Australia Pacific LNG project, APLNG. Underlying profit rose 33 per cent to $893 million. The company's also Australia's largest electricity retailer and chief executive Grant King shared a few of his views on results and the industry with me earlier.

Grant King, thanks for joining us.

GRANT KING, CEO, ORIGIN ENERGY: Thank you.

TICKY FULLERTON: Well, now you're in a bit of a purple patch I think, thanks largely to your NSW acquisitions. What actually drove profits there?

GRANT KING: Well, quite rightly as you said, Ticky, we did acquire NSW energy businesses, retail businesses and gentrader assets in the 2010-'11 year and of course this is the first full-year effect of that acquisition. We nearly doubled our customer numbers as a result of that acquisition and our energy sales volumes increased substantially, so it's simply a bigger business and that business was supported by an increased contribution from the generation or gentrader assets we acquired as well.

TICKY FULLERTON: So NSW: good. Queensland: the competition authority and the Newman Government seem to have been a bit of a thorn in your side this year, the Premier singling out Origin. Do you think the company could have handled things better earlier in the year? I'm thinking of the price hikes.

GRANT KING: Yes, I think the two part answer to that question is: what was firstly the underlying issue and that tariffs in Queensland or some of the tariffs in Queensland are set by the QCA, and we disagreed with the basis upon which they set those tariffs and we've initiated a judicial review accordingly. We moved those tariffs that we were free to move consist with our belief about what appropriate tariffs ought be, and clearly that clashed in some areas with the Queensland Government's intention to free some of those tariffs. At the end of the day, those tariffs that were subject to the freeze, we pulled back, and the other tariffs that we were free to deal with, we did so.

TICKY FULLERTON: Just one on the carbon price. You mentioned that your generators are needing to push I think about $1 billion in carbon price costs through at the wholesale level. What do you make of the political argy-bargy at the retail level over how much of price rises are - have the carbon price at their heart?

GRANT KING: So, you're quite right. Carbon costs affects generators. That goes into the wholesale cost of energy and the wholesale cost of energy is passed through to consumers. And that is largely quite efficiently reflected in the underlying carbon price of around $23 a tonne. In a typical bill, so for example for a customer in NSW a typical bill would have - somewhere between $150 to $200 being that carbon price element. But it's also important to note that that bill includes probably a bit more than $100 a year for other green schemes as well - the mandatory renewable energy target for example and the residual of some other small schemes. So there's something like $300 in a typical energy bill for example in NSW and similar numbers in other states that relate to a variety of green schemes.

TICKY FULLERTON: Nice to get that on the record. Let's move to APLNG because I think there's real focus by the company to make sure that you've got ample capacity to fund your contributions there. Beyond your existing domestic customers, I assume you give pretty short shrift to the idea put forward by some like Manufacturing Australia and the idea of a reserve put by for domestic manufacturing at a lower price.

GRANT KING: So that's inconsistent with the way Australia's approach to all of the resource industry, including agriculture and every other industry. Australia's wealth is obviously maximised by receiving the best value for its resources, no matter what those resources are. That's the first point. And I think the second important point is that there is a new manufacturing industry in Australia that's growing dramatically and that is LNG production. Billions of dollars have been invested in processing plants to take a fabulous resource in Australia and export that resource to countries who need it, particularly countries in North Asia and South-East Asia.

TICKY FULLERTON: Just on the RET, the renewable energy target, you've called for a thorough review, really, on costs and implications. What's gone wrong with the RET and what should the target be?

GRANT KING: Nothing's got wrong with the RET. The RET was premised in fact not on a percentage, 20 per cent by 2020, but a fixed number and that fixed number it so happens was set just before the GFC when forecast demand for electricity was the highest it's been ever since. So at the moment, based on current demand forecast by 2020, the RET scheme will be somewhere between 25 and 30 per cent, not 20 per cent. That has implications in terms of cost to consumers. In my view it will be more than the carbon cost. It has implications on the cost of our distribution and transmission networks and it has issues in respect of the industry's ability to deliver three times the rate of build of wind energy largely than the industry has achieved to date in the out years of this decade, 2015 to 2020. We are not advocating - in fact we support the renewable energy target - but we are saying is let's make sure all of the factual information is on the table in this review so we can decide as a community what is the target that we really want to sign on to that is in our interests and achieves the objective of the scheme which is to drive down the cost of renewable energy and encourage a diversity of renewable energy resources.

TICKY FULLERTON: Finally, Grant, 33 per cent impact growth this year and last year you had profit growth of over 30 per cent. In terms of your outlook, you're a little bit more cautionary.

GRANT KING: Yes. In the last two years we've delivered I think something north of 60 per cent growth in NPAT over those last two years. Having said that, a lot of that's been driven by capital investment, that new capital investment has been wound back other than for APLNG and APLNG is three years away in earnings. So we still believe we'll deliver that 10 to 15 per cent on average earnings growth that we've done really for the 12 years since we've been a listed company. But for the next year the outlook is a little bit muted.

TICKY FULLERTON: Pretty impressive result this year. Grant King, thank you very much indeed.

It's a fundamental human yearning to be a part of something bigger than one's self, and maybe that's what drove my mate Ash to die, far from home, in a bloody foreign war against Islamic State, writes C August Elliott.